Amenities of Literature by Isaac Disraeli

Author:Isaac Disraeli [Disraeli, Isaac]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

We may sympathise with the disconcerted foreigner who is a learner of the English language. All words ending in ugh must confound him: for instance, though, through, and enough, alike written, are each differently pronounced; and should he give us bough rightly, he may be forgiven should he blunder at cough ; if he escape in safety from though, the same wind will blow him out of thought. What can the foreigner hope when he discovers that good judges of their language pronounce words differently? A mere English scholar who holds little intercourse with society, however familiar in his closet be his acquaintance with the words, and even their derivations, might fail in a material point, when using them in conversation or in a public speech. A list of names of places and of persons might be given, in which not a single syllable is pronounced of those that stand written.

That a language should be written as it is spoken we see has been considered desirable by the most intelligent scholars. Some have laudably persevered in writing the past tense red, as a distinction from the present read, and anciently I have found it printed redde. Lord Byron has even retained the ancient mode in his Diary. By not distinguishing the tenses, an audible reader has often unwarily contused the times. G before I ungrammatical orthoepists declare is sounded hard, but so numerous are the exceptions, that the exceptions might equally be adopted for the rule. It is true that the pedantry of scholarship has put its sovereign veto against the practice of writing words as they are spoken, even could the orthoepy ever have been settled by an unquestioned standard. When it was proposed to omit the mute b in doubt and debt, it was objected that by this castration of a superfluous letter in the pronunciation, we should lose sight of their Latin original. The same circumstance occurred in the reform of the French orthography: it was objected to the innovators, that when they wrote tems, rejecting the p in temps, they wholly lost sight of the Latin original, tempus. Milton seems to have laid down certain principles of orthography, anxiously observed in his own editions printed when the poet was blind. An orthography which would be more natural to an unlearned reader is rejected by the etymologist, whose pride and pomp exult in tracing the legitimacy of words to their primitives, and delight to write them as near as may be according to the analogy of languages.

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